Landes argues that the Left stands for “fairness,” and that the Left Butler represents is a “deviation” from the real Left. He calls their Left “the self-destructivist Left,” while the one he identifies with is not one that favors appeasement of evil, while their Left supports “suicidal versions” of leftist “folly” that marches in the streets in support of a movement that would make all non-Muslims dhimmi. They have lost their “moral compass,” while the members of the Left he supports do not support the Islamic radicals, out of fear that to not show solidarity with them would make them “right-wingers.”

I discussed Landes’ argument with my friend David Horowitz, and he e-mailed me a thoughtful response with which I mainly concur. Horowitz writes:

The distinction he makes between a demotic Left and a revolutionary Left is fairy dust. Yes there have been and still are a handful of decent but impotent people on the Left whose political weight is non-existent. Whatever happened to the Euston Manifesto? What are the leftwing publications, organizations, recognized spokesmen who are defending Jews and Christians and even gays and women against the Islamo-Nazis? Were the same even calling them Nazis, which is what they are (and yes, the Nazis themselves were leftists)?

There is a fundamental snobbery and arrogance evident in the postures of the so-called demotic mini-Left. The leftists actually have a monopoly on all the values that we associate with human decency, equality, liberty, etc. But these values were actually instituted and made into a global force by conservatives — American conservatives who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and created a political system to make those values real. Judith Butler doesn’t act out of good intentions. She acts out of the same emotion that motivates the Left generally, which is hate. Henry James described them all in describing the feminist heroine of his novel The Bostonians: “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage, which was natural enough, inasmuch as to her vision almost everything that was usual was iniquitous. … The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might some day … be a martyr and die for something.” Or as Marx — who is the inspiration for all leftists — put it: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” That is the true voice of leftism. What the demotic mini-Left is about is sentimentality.

At the YIVO conference on Jews and the Left, the keynote address was presented by Michael Walzer, the co-editor of Dissent and a man who himself wrote a major essay a decade ago titled “Can There Be a Decent Left?” in which he expressed his disappointment with so much of what the current Left stands for. In my own comments, I mentioned that Walzer embodied a contradiction — a man of the Left who is pro-Israel but who stood out as one of a few precisely because there are hardly any others of the Left who are joining him. As I said, his own position was hardly known in the country at large, while the Left of The Nation magazine and its open hostility to Israel exemplifies the actual position of 99 percent of America’s leftist intellectuals. Therefore, I argued, Walzer was quite irrelevant.

I’m surprised that PJM doesn’t charge you for ad space the way you shamelessly link to yourself in every single comment you post. Has it ever occurred to you that if your blog was worth reading you’d get traffic without being a human spambot?

Well, not quite. Miss Spark’s blog isn’t a commercial site, and her links are always on topic. As for the notion that providing links proves the worthlessness of her blog, I believe that even successful companies advertise, and even successful sites link to themselves. And what, I ask you, would the web be without links?

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
Robert A. Heinlein

Non-control is NON-control. Control is control. Control is not non-control, and non-control is not control. (Hmm, reminds me of Monty Python’s “Holy hand-grenade” bit, but so be it.)

Initiation of force or fraud is not the same as defensive force or fraud.

But, to get back to the Radosh point, I think what he’s missing is that none of the leftists are genuinely liberal, but the so-called “conservatives” and Republicans he lists are more or less liberal. Landes’s definition was that of liberals, not leftists. But that’s what they do — co-opt and pervert word usage to muddy the political playing field, to try to adopt the generally-recognized-as-good mantle of liberality, while advocating anti-liberal initiations of force and fraud… widely, and then expressing shock, shock!, when any victims attempt to defend themselves, verbally or otherwise.

Is it self serving to refuse to control others? Yes, because there is the hope that you will not be so controlled. Is there a valid criticism for people who refuse this control? No, because anyone who believes people should be controlled has, mentally, converted you into their slaves.

Some people will not allow themselves to be enslaved. Others think that everyone is enslaved from birth.

The examples are clear at one extreme or the other. The problem comes in mixed societies where people are enslaved in certain areas, but not in others.

Usually, people do not favor direct slavery. They would rather that we all are enslaved by governments. They can receive the benefits of exploiting other people’s labor and enterprise without the inhumanity involved in actually owning people.

Dershowitz is interesting to ponder: He is the very BEST the Left has to offer, yet he is a living example of the destructive intellectual & moral cognitive dissonance with which even the brightest Leftists frequently live. Dershowitz remains a faithful & dedicated Leftist, never a liberal, despite having earned the wrath of today’s Left by going off the reservation on the topics of Israel & Terrorism. Dissent is not tolerated among the “all cultures are equal” “tolerant” Left…. We are fortunate that Dershowitz has courageously brought his significant intellect to bear upon the issues of terrorism and the unjust way Israel is treated. No one else of ANY ideological complexion has done comparable work to his books on these topics. Beyond that, however, despite his brain power, I would not look to him for directions on how to change a catbox. Profound intellectual & moral cognitive dissonance, absence of wisdom, and the simple absence of common sense cannot be compensated for by great booksmarts or intellectual horsepower.

The great Show Trials of Stalin-era Russia saw an entire generation of Bolsheviks voluntarily consign themselves to death by pleading guilty to crimes of which they were innocent, rather than leave the fold. That so many Leftists — even those who are attacked by their fellow Leftists and who must compromise themselves morally, ethically, intellectually (even unto their very lives) in order to remain on the Left — lack basic common sense, let alone self-preservation instincts shows that we are in the realm of non-rational faith-based religiosity.

So a Leftist makes utopian faith-based statements about the world and about their fellow Leftists…. not surprising, not terribly meaningful, not even very interesting…. The only distinction at that point becomes: are their utopian platitudes meant as a cynical & shrewd cover for more sinister intentions (a la POTUS, Rahm Emmanuel, etc.)? Or are they your garden-variety Leftist naif, fancy-schmancey vocabularies notwithstanding? In the final analysis, they are all equally destructive. The only Leftists one can readily respect are those who, like Ron Radosh, David Horowitz, etc., have displayed the enormous intellectual courage & flexibility to abandon their previous ideological commitments once they saw these were no longer morally, factually, rationally, intellectually sustainable.

The political vocabulary of “left” and “right” is meaningless today. Perhaps as a legacy of the Cold War, the term “left” now often means simply anti-American (and also sometimes anti-white, anti-European, and antisemitic). It is in this sense that people like Mahmoud Abbas, Hugo Chavez, or Judith Butler are “on the left.” This Richard Landes, with his antiquated concern with matters like “the dignity of labor” and “the well-being of the many,” speaks as though he were living in the 19th century — it’s no wonder he should be confused. Our times and our problems are completely different.

That’s an interesting way of putting it. I’ve gradually come to realize that the 19-century glitterati of Marie Antoinette et al never died out; they just went into hiding, and spent the first half of the 20th century sharpening their propaganda skills. Butler is Antoinette’s intellectual heir. Western liberalism was indeed hijacked by the Left, but that happened because of the intellectual weaknesses it had developed. After WWII the liberals became convinced that they had all of the answers and that the end of history was near. The creation of the UN was supposed to guarantee that no more wars would ever take place, and that poverty would be eradicated in a generation. That conceit left them easy prey for the re-emergent (and much more clever) old-school aristocracy that is the post-modern Left.

The quoted statement from Horowitz was intertesting to me, becuase I once had a brief conversation with him in which he said something similar, in fewer words: “The Left wanted their rights so they could use them to take away everyone else’s rights.” It was a turning point for me; I realized then that the radical Left were not a fringe group — they were running the show. Since then (this was in 1990), of the people I’ve known who once considered themselves “good” liberals, some have gone hard Left while others have rebuilt themselves as libertarians or neocons (and even a few socialcons). There are a few still out there calling themselves good liberals, but as Radosh points out, they just don’t matter anymore. And their philosophy is just as empty-headed and vulnerable to hijack as it was in 1950.

Among other things, I cannot visualize what someone would mean by “the dignity of labor” in a party that vigilantly opposes all efforts to require labor of any sort from those who force the rest of us to support their life choices and lifestyles.

There are countless Americans working at menial, thankless and wholly necessary jobs all over the USA. Yet the consistent Conservative big lie is a lazy poor. There are consistent Big Lies on both sides and the irony of an inescapable conclusion that political dissension is always good versus evil is never addressed, Why? because both sides are money making machines. If you want a real leader you look for someone who is at least smart enough to say they believe in all Americans. Calling your countrymen the enemy is poor rhetoric…for a leader, but not for a book seller.

Conservatives do not despise the poor. We value a solid work ethic and disparage no one who works hard to make ends meet. We are the cheerleaders urging rich and poor and in-between to strive excellently to achieve their goals. If the goal is to become rich, then we strive to provide the opportunity — an economic environment free of needless government interference — for those willing to exert themselves in attaining that goal.

We do despise anyone who wishes to get something for nothing. If you are poor, and desire to do nothing to improve your condition beyond clamor for welfare, then yes, we do not support your lifestyle choice and earnestly desire for you to change your ways.

Humanity isn’t nearly as nuanced as many leftist intellectuals would have you believe. The phrase about “baffling them with b@llsh*t” comes to mind. As Black Bart said, labels don’t really matter. In every group there will be people who want nothing more than to tell other people what to do. (Just check out the browbeating in your office’s United Way campaign)

The methods and justifications vary, but the end result is control. That’s the genius of our forefathers and the Constitution. They knew that freedom can be assaulted from any and all ideologies. Their goal was to make obtaining absolute power as slow and difficult as possible. Change NEEDS to reined in.

There are always those lurking in the wings to claim leadership when a power vacuum is created. Unfortunately, the average person is pondering a moderate “consensus” replacement, while the power-hungry are already establishing beachheads, as evidenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Spring.

“it would be nice if there was a decent Left, but its small and ineffectual numbers prove that its creation is something that will never take place”

-small numbers today tell us very little about what might be possible in future. Anyway, as I see it, the struggle today is against big government and its attendants in the media and academy. Big govenment is today leftist because it uses victimary politics as its justification and cause. But if big government does somehow collapse under its own weight, a new politics rooted in freedom and exodus from the old imperial order will have to emerge. I don’t see why, as a generalisation, we wouldn’t say that that politics will draw on old school liberalism (though hopefully with a stronger and more fully articulated understaning of the Judeo-Christian anthropology that was liberalism’s oft-denied historical roots).

It’s just that today may people who style themselves “conservatives” are arguably liberals who just can’t stand the left. Hence, there are many in Landes’ camp but just with different name tags. Ultimately, i think the question is will the world become more “Jewish”, embracing the human freedom to covenant in an exodus from empire,, or fall into the tyranny of the antisemitic (e.g. anti-American) alternatives. Maybe Landes and the rest of us just need to wear our religion, or anthropology, more on the sleeve.

I think you nailed it, truepeers. For a stretch back in the 90s, IIRC, many who now bear the tag “conservative” were referring to themselves as “classical liberals,” i.e., believers in freedom on the model of the Founders, using the 18th-19th century formulation. That was when a liberal stood for free minds and free markets, and a conservative stood for Throne and Altar. The rise of the modern Left after the French Debacle – I mean, Revolution – is what changed everything. I distinctly remember Shelby Steele, for one, referring to himself that way after his first book attracted so much attention; and the crew over at Reason still try to keep the term alive. Not a chance. The currency of “liberalism” has been thoroughly debased to the point that the only freedom a “liberal” stands for ends at the bedroom door – going OUT, not in!

Very true but isn’t the real story behind the Left that it is a bait and switch to old-fashioned European dominance. The Obama leftists are people who have real concern that their living standards are falling especially in relation to their parents. They are frustrated and frightened and looking for a sort of status which will arrest the fall. They are therefore putting forth a philosophy in which once you agree with it you implicitly accept the superiority of the European. Therefore the attitudes of the Left will always head towards what were traditional European attitudes of self superiority.

Would Leftists be as excited over Barack Obama if his mother and grandfather weren’t white communists? Not likely. I think our mistake is calling out what are the contradictory ideas of the Left when what really drives the Left are its emotional benefits to their adherents. Once we start challenging them on what they really get out of it (which is leftist political analysis anyway) we will have much more success.

That’s assuming what rises from the collapse isn’t worse than what we have now. The historic pattern is that when a Democracy or Republic falls, it ends up as a dictatorship. That was before the heady days of Totalitarianism and computers that can track everything every citizen does in real time, a capability which is rapidly expanding day by day.

It will probably come down to the food supply. If food moves beyond the reach of most people and they have to turn to government, that’s it. Really that is the only thing government has left to control. It can already freeze bank accounts, send gunslingers to get you in the middle of the night, and soon will be able to deny health care needs. Once they can do the same with food…

Thanks – I am a fan of Walzer and Berman and am happy to learn of more “decent leftists.”

Are there certain basic principles – liberal in the classic sense – democracy, pluralism, rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, equality,opposition of totalitarianism – whether of the right or left – that we can agree upon?

What about those of us who are apalled by Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler,
have real problems with Tom Friedman and others in the liberal media but
still believe in social democracy, Keynsian economics, national health
insurance etc. Not to mention climate change and changing the tax laws so
people like Mitt Romeny would pay more of their share?

And yes, there are some rightists who are racist, Islamaphobic, advocate unecessary wars – yes, there is of course a “Decent Right” but its not the entire Right

The main dividing lines are that they are liberal hawks, mostly. They support Israel and the West in the face of Isalm. They arent Anti-West, Anti American, or Anti-Israel. They are defenders of the West. They are Anti-Communist and support ostracization of radical leftists from polite society. Whilst they still are beholden to liberal-left economics, generally pro-union, and socially liberal.

The Right whatever you may say about parts of it, isnt Anti American, Anti Western, and largely is Pro-Israel. The likes of David Duke are ostracized from the mainstream conservative press, institutions, and political parties. The same cant be said of the Left, who coddles all sorts of radicals, Anti-Americans, Anti-Semites, etc. These radicals are in all manner of Leftist institutions, press, and political parties and are honored, lauded, and in positions of power within them.

PS – Terry Glavin is Canadian and is particularly suportive of the Afghanistan mission. The rest in the list are mostly Brits. One reason for this is that the American Left has been less infiltrated by Anti-Semitism than the British Left, although we can see that is changing in the Universities and by the recent kerfuffle with regards to Israel and Jerusalem on the floor of the Democrat National Convention.

And by extension, everybody who disagrees with Landes is not a decent person. Now let’s consider… does the party he supports actually do anything to advance any of the “decent” positions he holds dear? Why no, no it doesn’t. In fact, the party he so piously supports is antithetical to every position he claims as “decent”. Evidently Landes believes that you can achieve the Utopian Ideal by encouraging those who rabidly oppose the ideal. The end justifies the means, you have to break a few eggs to make omelets, if those pesky Jews would just get on the trains…

It’s hard to say if Landes is evil or delusional but at the end of the day he supports, aids, and advances evil. But, let me be clear, he only embraces evil to bring Heaven upon Earth, just like every Leftist mass murderer before him. Yeah, that’s what defines a “decent person”.

Very good points in the post and comments. However, Landes actually made a 3-way distinction between the “demotic”, revolutionary (totalitarian), and suicidal/self-destructive “lefts”.
All classifications are to some extent arbitrary (see the Ugly Duckling Theorem) but Landes’s classification seems at least useful. And not just to understand the modern “lefts”: consider Thomas Paine almost being guillotined in 1794; that was an early example of suicidal “leftism”.
OTOH Ron Radosh and some comments are in my opinion correct in saying that what Landes calls the “demotic left”, is now “the right”. It’s a simplification, but a good first approximation.
Whether there ever was a “demotic left” that was actually called “the left” is a matter for historical debate. However, considering the sympathies of Jefferson for the French Revolution, I think it odd that Horowitz labels the author of the Declaration of Independence a “conservative”.

Right, a modern conservative is the old classically liberal Left. Now they are Classically Liberal Christian Conservatives. Which is why the demotic Left is now actually on the Right. The Leftist party in the US has been shedding it’s liberals for half a century now, and is now dominated by the Radical Left.

The sad thing is, many Decent Leftists I know are all in on Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm. Which brings into question their decency, IMO.

Ive spent considerable time with both Decent Leftists and Neo Conservatives…not just reading and the occassional contact with the more famous amongst them. The reason why they are Decent Leftists is that they still vote for and support the Center Left parties…..else they would then become Neo Conservatives….like Mr. Radosh who no doubt still supports many Left-liberal policy prescriptions and notions.

It all depends on what you define as “center-left” parties.
I hardly ever use “right” and “left” when I want my words to mean something, but certainly I would not describe the xxi century Democratic party as “center-left”.

I think Horowitz is canny when he writes “…these values were actually instituted and made into a global force by conservatives.”

To me, that is one of the monumental themes of the push-pull between conservative and liberal thought, the idea that liberals despise what got us to where we were last mid-century. In other words, liberals are killing the goose that laid the golden egg, based on mistaken assumptions that basically throws out almost all of American history as genocidal and racist, not to mention conformist.

Liberals believe they have “fixed” America but in fact they have turned their back on classic thought, pragmatism and paradigms of success, and bewilderingly decided to back every historic failure we know of. It is one thing to legislate equality, it is another to believe that was done because historical failure was in fact oppressed by anything but what Mother Nature and reality dictated. Thus the imagined sins of whites and men to account for that failure and the subsequent innate immorality granted to history’s success stories.

“…We are you see, good people. Not moral people nor sane people. Morality requires values and sanity demands contact with some outpost of the real world outside the simulacrum of outraged noise on all the channels, real and virtual. Morality is hard, goodness is easy. Morality is about right and wrong, but goodness is about condemning those most like you in order to feel better about yourself.

Goodness is childishly easy. Go to a movie theater and wait for people to talk. Then feel good about not being one of the talkers. Goodness is watching thousands of people getting killed and feeling good because unlike those crazy rednecks or the bridge and tunnel crowd, you feel no yearning for vengeance. Goodness is watching Americans die and then picking out a Muslim convenience store and offering him whatever support he needs against all those bigots who are sure to show up with American flags and torches sooner or later, because unlike you, they aren’t good people at all.

We are a nation led by immoral people who think they are good, by politicians, professors, priests, rabbis, pundits, crackpots and activists who having no values are determined to excuse all the evil that they do by being relentlessly good people. When they sacrifice something, whether it’s a night out or your life, then they will make sure that everyone knows it. And when you protest, they will tell you about all the sacrifices that they are making, because despite all the blood and filth on their hands, they are good people. Good amoral sociopaths who learned everything they know about right and wrong from television and feel-good slogans…”

It’s too glib, and too easy, to accuse them of pure nihilistic wickedness.

They really do–well, the true believers, anyway–believe that they are Right and everyone else is Wrong, and they really do believe that Come the Revolution, They Will be Vindicated. They see the world in caricatures directly from 1920s Soviet agitprop posters, complete with pot-bellied “international plutocrats” wearing top hats and monocles, sneering and twirling their mustaches evilly as they grind the Hero-Peasant-Workers into the dust.

And only the brave few postmodern intellectuals–that is, the brave besieged heroic few who just happen to control all the big newspapers, the TV networks, the movie studios–dare to Speak Truth to Power… by telling us all each day, all day, every day, what we may think and what we may not, what thoughts are acceptable to speak aloud in polite company and what thoughts are not. Because, God help us all, what will we do if the bitter honky hicks with their guns and their Jesus start thinking for themselves? It’s for their own good. Why, if we didn’t tell them what to think, they’d be stringing up “undesirables” from every lamppost and it’d be just like the pogroms in the Old Country.

Landes shows us the good old True Scotsman fallacy in action. Anyone who does things Landes approves of is a True Leftist; anyone who does things he disapproves of is a False Leftist – an aberration, an exception, not to be associated with the Real Thing. It’s a clever device that allows him to avoid admitting that he is in bed, ideologically, with some truly vile characters.

Ron, within what you and David know…intimately…lies the reason that there can be no decent Left today.

1)The Left has hijacked “classic liberalism” and killed it. Swallowed it whole. The basic tenets of Landes’ “demotic left” are gone. Evaporated. Wiped out. I wrote a comment to a Roger Kimball article on these pages a couple of years ago describing the difference….when commenting on Christopher Buckley being sucked into the Obama vortex of Fabian illusion. Landes lives in this illusion and tries to cling to the notion that the illusion is reality.

He makes up every fantasy he can conjure in order to hold onto his security blanket that if only he clicks his ruby heels, he can get home again to a place where “liberals” live and thrive.

No such place exists any longer. He needs to be “on the left” because if he loses the mantle of not being “right wing”, he loses his identity. His identity is not tied, therefore, to the notions of right and wrong, fair is fair, logically working through issues…one by one, line item by line item…true to principled thought. He struggles …and fails…to hold onto his membership in a radical extremism ring of hell, while denying that it is radical or extreme, a ring or hellish…as long as he is a member.

2)Landes thinks he pulls off this “I’m in their group, but they don’t exist in mine” because the power of radical extreme leftism stems from two elements.

a)they live in camouflage
b)they are completely unaccountable for any of their words, deeds, acts and motivations

Neo-Coms (or small c communists, as Bill Ayers prefers)hide all of their motivations, intentions, words, acts, deeds behind a mantle of Landes’ vaporized “classic liberalism’s tenets”. They ate the meat out of the conch shell and use it to travel in under an ocean of lies, distortion and deceit.

Neo-Coms also burrowed into the head of the media beast and laid their eggs, like fire ants, making slave of the truth and hiding in plain sight, while controlling the desperate attempts to unveil them and their intentions. The fire ants burn and sting America and Israel with near impunity, while their pocket press provides them complete cover…and no accountability.

Landes wants to, has to, needs to…ignore what has happened to his “compassionate” and “soft left”. He doesn’t want to lose his identity. Otherwise, he would have to cross over to the “dark side”. He would rather fool himself, his delusion salves his fear. He is an enabler for all he says he loathes. One of those things cannot be true. He either doesn’t loathe it or wouldn’t be helping them so.

There used to be decent Democrats. They were mostly hardworking middle class workers who valued their freedom, were embarrassed to go on the “dole,” and did not necessarily hate people who make a lot of money. The voted for Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and felt betrayed by Lyndon Baines Johnson. They spotted Jimmy Carter for the fool he is.

Meanwhile came the “hippies” and the far Left who are largely responsible for the moral, intellectual, political and spiritual decline of our culture.

the very few real liberals, sad they sound just like the Muslims– “they hijacked what was mine”

yup- and the question is can you get it back from them? and when? until that time I will continue to lump you all together and take your inaction, impotence as complicity.

I was encouraged when Lieberman and Koch realized they had been hijacked and could not longer be part of what is now the New Left (Democrats)
But it is way too little and way too late- they supported Obama & now the damage is done.

The youngest generation is not even familiar with true liberalism- fully versed in politics of grievance and easily manipulated by the Progressives using nice sounding words like “human rights” and social justice” which actually mean nothing of the sort. We all know the ending of these type of stories.

How did Jung get thrown in with the revolutionaries? He was a very much an individualist whose politics, to the extent he had any at all, were conventional Swiss conservatism (i.e., 19th-century classical liberalism) bordering on libertarianism. He once wrote* that the state was a fiction, a device for those who knew “how to manipulate it” to maximize their power. This is hardly a Leninist, even a Hegelian, assessment.

The leftist I know are obsessed with collecting attonements for every wrong ever perpetrated by every class of people not like themselves. What their cranium can’t absorb is that histroy isn’t a snapshot but a scroll. Those events and people in them are gone. They demand extractions of attonement from the innocent based upon labels that they placed on people and institutions from the past, racist, imperialist, mysogynist, capitalist, homophobe, evangelist, crusader, etc. They also see all their perceptions of past errors as a collage making their worldview worse and les tolerable with time. They have, in effect set themselves up as the supreme judge and executioner of history not waiting till the end of time, but right now. Their natural counter-reaction to a piling on of minor and majorwrongs is ever more strident till it becomes radical itself. They cannot come to terms with the movement of history; that things have changed for the better and will continue so. They are stuck in the past by the trail of unattoned evidence of mankinds’ sins and Because they have no God they must become God in order to prosecute all sins as seen in their eyes.

Yes they certainly irrationally spin effects into their own “causes” and pretend history started whenever they said so, and not before! This leads to their inherent immoral relativism, most usually expressed in the argumentum tu quoque, or “Islam (and all other forms of crime) aren’t evil, because we all do them too!”

Andrew Klavan has a good take here on their false self-righteous hypocrisy, too:

NO, that’s only more immoral relativism. What’s necessary is for at least one “side” to stop comparing aples and rocks, and to admit: “Yes, this is bad in itself; bad is bad.” Otherwise, it just perpetuates the childish cycle that two wrongs somehow makes one of them into a right.

Besides, “attacking” isn’t what’s bad; only attacking FIRST.

All crimes are forms of theft: offensive attacks that deny the attacker’s victim something they, not the attacker, are entitled to; basic robbery is theft of one’s stuff (and so is arson); kidnapping, assault, and rape are all thefts of one’s bodily autonomy, murder is theft of one’s life, and lying (fraud) is only the most basic form of theft – it’s the theft of the Truth. (And lying includes presenting one’s merely subjective, unresearched, fact-free opinion as if it were objective fact; i.e: pre-judicial slander)!

And even all threats are psychological attacks (aka: coercion, duress, extortion, “terrorism”) which are thefts of one’s peace of mind and security, and all non-defensive attacks are already classified as crimes.

After all, when you attack the Others first, then, by definition, you are the predatory criminal aggressor, and they are your innocent victims – there’s no two ways about it!

(Attacking second, in defense of one’s self and/or of innocent others, is always OK, and is in fact a mandatory requirement for having any sort of deterring justice in the world at all, ever! Without counter-attacks criminals have no reason to be deterred into ceasing theirs)!

Thus, we have developed a natural law, which rationally depends on these cause-and-effect facts, known as The Golden Rule of Law, which, by defining situational morality as “Do Not Attack First!” enables trust, progress, and Civilization. It is often abstracted as “THOU SHALT NOT KILL!”

It’s opposite might be called ‘the brazen rule of chaos,’ which defines immorality as “only we have the holy right to always attack all ‘The Others’ first, so there, nyah!” and so inflicts distrust, stagnation, and Barbarism. It has been abstracted as “THOU SHALT KILL!” (and is known today as “islam”)!

Even the ‘Ten’ Commandments are really only a bunch of listed symptoms, illustrating this simple binary; the first five are all cautions to “Fear and Obey!” while the second five are all admonishments not to steal! Thus, they, too, can be summed up as “Greed NOT; Be Fearful!” (or: don’t attack first)! – while islam embodies the exact opposite (“Fear NOT; Be Greedy”) – or: “Always attack first!”

And of course the victim-blaming rationale for evil is always that one was somehow only “defending” one’s self, by pre-emptively attacking the others first, by adding insult to injury with the slanderous implication that “well, they were going to attack me, anyway” and “so it’s for their own good for them to Submit to me attacking them, first”)!

It was first coined by Cong Fuzi (“Confucius”) in the negative (as “Do NOT Do Unto Others…!”) and then allegedly by Jesus in the (false, nannnysate advice) positive, and since then it’s been used in the UN’s founding Charter (where it describes the #1 War-Crime as “to be the aggressor in war”). It’s the physician’s Hippocratic Oath (“First, Do No Harm!”) and is even used by social engineers as the “Precautionary Principle.”

It’s opposite creed, which I’ve termed the ‘Brazen Rule of Chaos’ has been attributed by John Milton in Paradise Lost, to Satan, as: “Who Dares, Wins!”

Backwards criminals always conflate their own “might-makes-right” jungle-law creed with the Old Testament’s “An Eye for An Eye” doctrine of proportional deterrence and justice, when in fact they are exact opposites! They also pretend the (after-the-fact) “ends justify the means!” when, in fact, the means only ever really define the end results:

After all, when you decide to lie, kill, and otherwise steal to get ahead, in the end, you’re not really a “great success,” you’re still really only a lying, murdering thief!

The first leftist was Cain and they’ve been doing the same $hit ever since. They are the children of the Father of Lies and expecting them to change, play fair or ever be worth the oxygen they breathe is foolish.

Classical Liberals believed the individual was the most basic social unit; they held that only individuals could possess rights, and that all mere groups (of individuals) were at most to be assigned some temporary, revokable privileges.

This is what modern ‘Conservatives’ are supposed to be trying to “conserve!”

But today’s victimology-selling totalitarian Conformists (communists, obviously; and national socialists/nazis, and neo-liberals, corporazis and tribalist moslems) pretend that, “Since there’s always a diverse multiplicity of causes and effects, we can never really know anything for sure! In fact, since all ‘facts’ are really only opinions anyway, my fact-free opinions are the diversely opposite equals to your silly facts!” and “my rights to an un-earned self-esteem and the corollory right to not be offended by the painful truth, trump your right to tell me about that truth and even my own right to learn from my mistakes! Whee!” Such infantile delinquents hold that: “It’s my right to be wrong, and you can’t stop me!”

Since there’s no money in solutions, these fear-salesmen thus always try to turn simply-solved, temporary problems with easy, permanent solutions into eternal crises, with only temporary, band-aid therapies (i.e: “Please Give Generously – AGAIN!”) in order to sell you lowest as a helpless victim, in order to sell themselves to you as the most high – as some sort of much-needed crisis-relief management expert ‘leaders.’

Which is why we are all currently ruled by salesmen, by “beloved leaders,” and not by the Public SERVANTS we thought we’d hired (‘elected’) in the first place!

And their plan, as ever, is to dilute their own responsibility to all human laws, by using the childish notion that even small children wouldn’t fall for (as in ‘the legal fiction of the corporate person,’ where a group buys the right to take risks which only affect other people, for gains which only accrue to themselves – they want rights without responsibilities!):

“I didn’t do it – ONLY The GROUP did it! Whee!”

For this, they demand that only groups should be given rights, while all fallible, weak, and so potentially dangerously flawed individuals should at most be assigned some temporary, revokable privileges.

Never having any facts which would ever agree with their perpetual irrationality, the left must always resort to the slanderous evasions known collectively as the critical thinking logical fallacies (the deflective ad-hominem personal attacks, the distractive strawman red-herrings, and of course the immoral relativist’s favorite, the tu quoque – i.e: “islam isn’t evil because we all do it too! Whee!”).

Isn’t it funny that people who actually have facts, rarely (if ever) seem to feel the need to indulge in fallacies?

Yes, the problem is that liberals hate personal responsibility, so they avoid it by selling endless group-rights victimology scenarios instead. That way the cowards can pretend to be champions without accusing any individual criminals of their crimes!

Leftists of all colours don’t think at all – they only react to fearing fear by wanting to form ever-larger groups and give them “rights” in order to protect themselves from all forms of self-reliant individual human self-responsibility!

Opposing any particular evil doesn’t make one good. The Nazis were against Communism; the Crips hate the Bloods.

I’ve been reading Landes for a long time. He’s done an immense amount of very valuable work exposing Arab lies about Israel and the complicity of the Left in those lies. His work on the “Mohammed al-Durah” hoax has been brilliant.

It seems astonishing that he would claim all good people are of the “demotic Left”. I’ll have to read his blog and comment there.

The point that “classical liberalism” is closer to modern conservatism than to modern liberalism is well taken. But one should not pretend that classical 19th century liberalism was not “culturally liberal”. In Catholic countries, to be liberal was to be against the Church, for instance.

We need more discussion in America and around the world like this thread.
I was reading the thread about “control” – interesting. My thought is that control is necessary but in this sense – individuals must control themselves and their more base, lizard brain emotions. I don’t want big government or big religion to tell me what to do but I also can’t do what I want if it violates ethics. But who’s ethics? For me I prefer to follow Jesus of Nazareth’s ethics. But I am open to listening about your ethics if different and to have peaceful interaction. GOD BLESS THE USA

Everything you need to know about the modern left you learned in junior high. Liberalism is an inherently adolescent belief system. It is not surprising in a land as privileged as ours, that a growing chunk of our people would fail to move out of adolescence. Those people gravitate to the liberal side.

This is why trying to understand the liberal mind is so much like trying to understand the mind of your teenage children.

Landes’ full paragraph: “So personally, I think most every decent person is on the demotic left, in the sense that they treat others (including women) with respect and dignity; they agree to abide by the isonomic principle “whoever’s right, my side or not” (i.e., limits to the “my side right or wrong mentality); and they use violence only to defend themselves from unwarranted aggression and not to dominate others. Obviously in the real world, no one (or very few) can sustain this positive-sum ethos all the time, and judgments about what is aggression and what is defense always arise.”

90% / 10% in the U.S. and Europe. There are still outright racists, militarists, and religious totalitarians in the fever-swamps of the right.

Maybe 80% / 20% worldwide; because the ethno-religious fascists that infest Islam, and are also present in India (“Hindutva”) are more “right” than “left”. To this one can add the Russian-nationalist “right” of Putin and Zhirinovsky.

Also, in Latin America, a large part of the “right” is just the property-holding class, whose chief interest is maintaining their political control and their wealth. (Not all or even most wealthy Latin Americans are “crony capitalists”, but in countries with high corruption and weak rule of law, there’s a substantial correlation between wealth and crime.)

The present Republican party? 95%/5% (the latter including the outright corrupt). The Tea Party? 98%/2% (the Tea Party is wide open to anyone, including cranks).

that is just an all out LIE right there- how did the left treat Sarah Palin or Bachman? Mia Love? I don’t think effigies of SP’s head in a noose was respectful.
How about how they treat “other’s” well the fact they see “otherness” as evil, war criminals, think it’s OK to destroy their porperty, throw urine on them etc does not fall into the dignified category either

And both sides claim that the other one is not like it used to be. It used to be civil and the loyal opposition, but now it is mean-spirited, radical, and takes no prisoners. Essentially, both sides say, we can be extreme because our opponents are now extreme. But, oh yeah, I forgot; they are mistaken, and you guys are telling the truth. Got it

Obviously, that is not how I see it. At least a third of the people here frame things in such an extreme and tunnel-visioned view, that would make going OVER to that particular dark side…just too dark. The sons of Belial on the left have similar problems.

Romney can be a real centrist, but he needs the red meat, tunnel-visioned base, making for a very odd election. As for Obama, he did keep on the REPUBLICAN Secretary of Defense, a practical, non-partisan move, but from what you heard here and on Rush etc., you’d think he was leading Vichy France. People get carried away all the time with their wild and goofy rhetoric, probably because some balanced view is just too boring…or dare we say…demanding. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pre-define the other side as villainous, parse every situation in that light, and if the situation can’t be parsed that way, then it is simply not relevant. And that passes for deep thinking?

Incidentally, Landes wrote of the “demotic left” without a capital – so he did not mean “the Left” in any identified way. Not “the Left” which the likes of Chomsky, Ayers, or Castro proudly identify with, but a range of political and philosophical thought derived from classical liberalism which includes nearly all modern “conservatives”.

As someone also familiar with Landes’ work I think Rich Rostrom describes him correctly. Not only did he do heroic work exposing the al Durah incident he has developed a whole schema to describe the anatomy of the false paradigms that dominate the academic world and the postmodern left. He talks about Political Correctness and the Post Colonialism and how it has disabled Western Civilization ability to deal with Islamism. Here is a quote from his latest article at theaugeanstables.com

“The results have made clear how poorly we Westerners conduct ourselves on the global stage, and how the news media self-inflicts some of those wounds. At the heart of the drama stands a President of the US, who plays win-win checkers against enemies who play I-win-you-lose three-dimensional chess; and at the same time a Western news media which rushes to publish as news, the poisoned meat of lethal narratives.”

I don’t always agree with him but I almost learn from reading him and I would point out that RR is disagreeing with him on certain points that may help us understand better what it means to be conservatives.

As someone who grew up the son of an FDR liberal and Keynesian economist I am acutely aware that the left has become something else and it vital to understand that change. Barry Rubin had an excellent article here on pjmedia last week challenging the political right to see the limitations of the majority of labels they use on Obama. The take away for me was that if we just see Obama through well established categories of thought – socialist, Muslim etc. – we will miss that he is also something new too – a truly slippery and dangerous post modern politician. I am going to go back and read the whole interchange between RR and Landes to see what I can learn.

The problem with trying to use intellectual arguments to explain why the Left thinks the way it does is that you are applying your own intelligence onto people who don’t have any. Perhaps, prior to the 1970′s, you could actually argue with a liberal and see some coherant thought being expressed. But now your average “educated” liberal probably has multiple degrees in “Studies” that have given them the credentials to spout off about subjects they’re too stupid to understand, much less argue about. But they’ve been told all their lives how “smart” they are, and how stupid conservatives are, so they look down their nose at anybody who disagrees with them. When you add in the absense of morality that has been drummed into them since grade school, only to be replaced with the certianty that the only evil in the world is Right Wing Christian Conservatism, you’re left with people of below average intelligence who are absolutely convinced they’re smarter than you and that you are not only wrong, but Evil with a capital E. You’re wasting your time. Just mock them. It’s a lot more fun.